New MacBook Air lives up to Apple name

Sunday

Dec 9, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Bob and Joy Schwabach ON COMPUTERS

Among the true believers, everything from Apple — MacBooks, iPhones or iPads — is treated like a sacred object. So when the new MacBook Air came out this summer, our natural skepticism raised its wary head. After a suitable hiding period, we went out and bought one. OK, it’s great.

At $999, the 11-inch Air is more expensive than just about any Windows computer, but that has pretty much always been true for Apple products, so you have to shrug it off. Once you take the big gulp and spend the money, it turns out to be a sheer joy to use. We got the cheapest model, with 64 gigabytes of flash storage. We think that’s plenty of memory. We can store photos and videos to a USB stick or move them out to the cloud.

The latest MacBook Air is the lightest, most comfortable laptop we’ve ever had, perfect for traveling, and 60 percent faster than last year’s model. The keys light up and are separated, making it easier to type than any other laptop we’ve tried. The track pad lets you spread your fingers to enlarge text, pinch to reduce. Battery life is five hours. The USB ports are version 3.0, the fastest of course. There is no hard drive, so storage is in the form of flash memory, like a USB memory stick. And the case is beautiful.

You’d think it would be difficult to switch from a Windows operating system to the Mac, but it seemed natural to us. If we got confused we opened Google and queried: “How do I...?” And then we’d get the answer.

One of the often-touted advantages of the Mac is security. The talk is you don’t need to buy an anti-virus program or do regular maintenance chores if you exercise ordinary caution. What kind of caution? The kind that applies to PCs as well: Don’t open email attachments from unknown sources, don’t install pirated software, don’t visit questionable websites and turn on the firewall, which is off initially.

We soon realized we didn’t need to buy new software for this machine. The “Text Editor” that comes with the Macbook Air lets you save whatever you write as a Word document and works much like Word. We downloaded the free Picasa from Google for photo editing, though the Air has its own photo editor. We’re still mainly Windows users, but for traveling the Air is great.

When choosing our first smartphone recently, we didn’t go for the new Windows phone, Nokia’s Lumia, or the Nexus 4, which sold out at T-Mobile within minutes of its introduction. Now that’s hot!

We went with the Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G. Why? We wanted a physical keyboard.

The keyboard slides out and allows us to avoid frustration when typing. Some reviewers have criticized the feel of the keys, but we found them more satisfying than typing on the phone’s glass screen.

The Relay has the Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, front and rear-facing cameras, and a nearly 12-hour battery life. The sound quality is quite good and music sounds better on it than it does on our iPod Touch. GarageBand and many other fun apps come pre-installed.

We’re on the $30-a-month, unlimited-Web-and-texting and 100-talk-minutes plan. By saving about $50 a month over the typical contract, we’ll shortly recoup the $400 we spent on the phone. By the way, this is a special deal. When we called to activate the plan, the T-Mobile rep told us we could only get it if we bought the phone at Wal-Mart. This turned out to be not true. We told him we had a transcript of our chat with the first rep, and only then did he admit that this deal is also available on the Web. So we hung up and activated our phone on the Web. Sometimes, you have to get tough.

By the way, when you take your smartphone to another country, you may be in for a shocking charge. Our brother in Boston was dinged for $50 in data charges in the first few minutes he stepped off the plane in China.

So we were cheered to learn of GlobalGig, which offers a mobile hotspot that avoids those costs by logging into the local network in each market through the user’s smartphone, tablet or laptop. The speed is 7.2 megabyte per second. You can pay for a gigabyte of data for $25 or up to five gigabytes for $49. It’s strictly pay as you go, no contract. The hotspot itself is $119 and is available at globalgig.com.

Another way around the high costs is to purchase a local SIM card when you reach your destination. But one hates to take out the SIM card, because it has all your contacts on it. Aha! How to get around that: You can use a SIM card copier, but you probably don’t have one, and most of the folks who bought one on Amazon gave it poor reviews. So, ask the phone store where you’re buying your new SIM card to transfer over the data from your other card. Almost any large phone store should be able to do that.

“WordPress, the Missing Manual,” by Matthew MacDonald; $30 from oreilly.com.

WordPress may be the single most popular program for creating and maintaining a professional looking website or blog. There is a free version of the program at the maker’s website, wordpress.com, and they will even host your website for free if you allow their logo to be part of the address. Hard to beat all that. By the way, we use WordPress software for our site, and you can see it at oncomp.com. Other users include Sony PlayStation, People Magazine and — gasp! — The Rolling Stones.

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